


There But for Grace

by SylvanWitch



Category: Sons of Anarchy
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-10
Updated: 2012-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 18:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/588377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are things about grace we can't ever hope to know, but we hope anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There But for Grace

**Author's Note:**

> I've been listening to _Songs of Anarchy_ , particularly the cover version of _House of the Rising Sun_ , which naturally got me to thinking about the man whom Jax calls "Father." That's how this happened.

“JT!”

 

The voice is coming from some distance and filtered through his hard breathing and the rhythmic beating of his feet against the dirt.

 

He vaults a fence without pausing to look back, willing the voice to lag further behind.

  
“JT, wait!”

 

Shrill now, and breaking at the edges with strain, the voice drives guilt through him and he falters in his running, as sure as if he’d driven a nail through the bottom of his shoe and into the soft part, where he can’t defend himself and run at the same time.

 

John Teller turns back the way he’d come and waits, hands on his hips, stance ready to announce his displeasure, as if the expression on his face—thunderous—isn’t enough to do that already.

 

“I thought,” says the little girl, “You were going to play with me today.”

 

JT shakes his head and snorts.  “Not my turn,” he denies, turning on one dusty sneaker and heeling it toward the creek bank.  He can smell the water, brown-green and slow in the wide place under the spreading sycamore.  Without strain, he can feel the rope burning against his hands as he hangs tight, swings out in a perfect arc, lets go.

 

It’s the only place he can really fly.

 

“I can swim too,” Lacey insists, her little feet making hardly a noise as she jogs to keep up with his longer strides.

 

“Nuh-uh,” he denies, shaking his head harder.  “You’re too little.  Besides, I ain’t watching you, ‘n if you drown, I ain’t gonna tell ‘em where to look for your body.”

 

That does the trick.  The patter subsides, and he puts some distance between them again.

 

A thin, long wail breaks his momentary sense of freedom.

 

“Fine!” he huffs, giving in.  He does not turn to take in his little sister’s face, her smug satisfaction and growing glee at getting to play with the “big kids.”  “But if you get hurt, I’m leaving you to rot,” he warns her in a growl.

 

He doesn’t really mean it.

 

Years later, when the cops fish out Lacey’s body from where it’s snagged on a bridge abutment downstream, when they scour the town for evidence of a crime and come up empty, deciding it was an accident, and take her scumbag boyfriend, Chet’s, word for it that she was tripping on acid and threw herself in, John Teller will remember the day she followed him to the creek and sat on the bank, too afraid to go in the water, while he took turns on the rope with his best friends, Roy and Stevie, and hooted just a little louder, laughed just a little more to make Lacey jealous of his grace.

 

*****

 

“JT!”

 

Her name is Mai, and she can’t be more than seventeen, porcelain-skinned, almond-eyed, almost boy-like in her figure and fast like one, racing parallel to him along the dike, bare feet a blur as she tries to beat him to the end of the rice paddy and cut him off before he leaves the ville for recon.

 

“JT!” she calls, waving a slender hand, face wide open like the sun-bright sky overhead, wide-brimmed hat flapping ungainly against her back as she earns sour glances from the old men, sharp words from the mama-sans working in the water below the dikes.  She’s tied the bandana he gave her around the crown, the familiar orange and black of the Harley logo making him ache for things he’s not sure he’ll ever have again.

 

Mai beats him to the road and stands waiting for him, face beaming, eyes downcast, chest heaving with the race.  “Where you go?” she asks, as she always does.

 

She speaks broken English with a French accent, and his heart trips in his chest to hear her say his name.

 

He waves a hand toward the tree-line without answering, aware of the eyes of his LT on them, ignoring the filthy suggestions and obscene noises from his buddies that Mai either doesn’t understand or is used to ignoring.

 

“I’ll catch you later, Mai,” he says, and as always, she looks up when he says her name and gives him a smile that hints of dark nights in the humid air, of black hair like a silk curtain and pale, bare skin like moonglow.  His breath catches and he feels a stirring, heat like lightning in his belly.

 

“Later,” he says again, falling in next to Piney, who gives him a world-class leer. 

 

JT catches movement out of the corner of his eye as she races back to her place in the paddy, her slender back carving a shallow arc out of the sky.  He thinks he’s never seen anything so perfect or so beautiful.

 

Later, when they’ve returned from recon to find the village a smoking wreck, he picks through charred flesh and bone shrapnel to find some evidence of her, hoping all the time that she’s out there somewhere, hiding in the paddy, her soft lips wrapped around a hollow reed.  

 

At the edge of the paddy, he discovers instead his bandana, tied to the butt of an American rifle thrust barrel-down into the earth.  It’s a flag to mark the cause and effect at work in this godforsaken country.  It says Mai and her people would still be alive if it weren’t for JT and his.  For a moment, he sees Mai again, fleet on her bare, flashing feet as she races ahead of him, wanting him to follow, and he wonders if he flings himself headlong into the water, will his munitions belt be enough to weigh him down?

 

Piney slaps him on the shoulder and retrieves the bandana and gun, says, “We’re bugging out in ten,” and breaks JT away from his memory of a slim body at work against gravity, grace like a white flag surrendering to the whole force of the world.

 

*****

 

“JT!”

 

He’s halfway to his bike when she calls him, voice wrecked by tears and too many cigarettes.

 

“JT!”  she calls again, and he can hear her heels on the gravel, digging in, finding purchase.  

 

“JT!” a third time, and she snatches at him, a nail snagging in his ponytail, jerking him to a stop.  He refuses to turn around.

 

“Baby, it’ll be alright.  Doctors are wrong all the time.  It doesn’t mean anything.  We aren’t going to lose Thomas.  Not our baby.  Not our little boy.”

 

He can’t look at Gemma’s face, can’t see the lie he knows is there, lurking at the corners of her lips where they betray her terror and pain.

 

“I’ve gotta go, Gem,” he says.  “We’ve got a run up to Portland.  We’ll talk about it tomorrow, okay?”

 

“Okay, baby,” Gemma answers, both hands on his shoulders, body pressed tight to his back.  He can feel her breath shuddering damp against his neck, feel the way her fingers twitch as they tighten her hold.  “Be careful.”

 

He turns to get free of the hands, to take control long enough to kiss her, unwilling to taste the salt on her lips, ignoring the redness in her eyes.

 

He’s out of the yard before the rest of the crew, throttling out against a stream of slow traffic, hearing the thunder of his brothers rolling up behind him.

 

He knows the road by heart, feels its curves in his belly and spine, waits for the bend in the road that brings them up next to the river, snug against the silty bank that drops away.  The shoulder is treacherous, promising disaster, and he flirts with it, letting gravel spin up in rooster tails as he catches the edge and comes back to the asphalt.

 

Piney roars up next to him, jerks his head, asking a question JT doesn’t want to answer.  He shakes his head, grins into the wind, catching grit in his teeth, and then lets go with one hand to give the thumbs up.

 

Piney answers with a different digit, and JT grins for real, the crew growling past him, letting him loiter.  Their minds are on whiskey and pussy in Portland, his caught in the glint of the water, on the white break where it foams over rock, on the promise of it, elusive and eternal.  He wonders if he drove his bike over the bank, down into the deep part past the railroad bridge, would he be baptized of his past sins enough to keep them from being visited on his sons?

 

He’s considering, the next bend coming fast, imagines hanging in the air for an eternal moment before the crash and the wave overtake him.

 

Then Clay is there, close on the outside, driving him back toward the center line, eyes avid, like he knows exactly what JT was thinking.

 

In answer, JT opens her up, lets out a howl and goes, leaving behind a last glimpse of the river, a flash of light, a brother at his back to keep him honest.

 

Grace, he guesses, has nothing to do with how you go on. 


End file.
